One must have chaos in one's heart to give birth to a dancing star.

such loud noise is an “MP3 story blog” written by me. It is an attempt to write about music much like a person who likes architecture might dance in appreciation of it. Read the whole Preslav Literary School post with sonic accompaniment, as it was originally intended. If you enjoy this, consider subscribing to the such loud noise RSS feed.

This man next door has drilled a hole through the wall separating my kitchen from his hallway. He stands at the other side of the wall, his eye peering into my kitchen at all hours of the day and he waits for me to engage him in a bit of conversation. We speak through the hole in the wall, our communication compressed into tidy bits of regurgitated information. Sometimes he asks me about the stars in the sky, he says he’s never seen them before. I tell him it’s daylight right now and you can’t see something that isn’t there. In the light, the stars are hidden or else they don’t exist anymore. Besides, I tell him, you only just drilled the hole in the wall and surely you’ve seen the stars before that. He doesn’t answer but he does ask that I relay a few questions to the stars on his behalf.

Later, I come to the hole in the wall and find him gazing silently at the blender on the counter. I tell him that I spoke to the stars and that they wanted to know more about the grass that shifts so slightly in the evening breeze. He says he thought they might be interested in the grass and “What did you tell the stars?” I tell him about the conversation I had with the stars about grass and about how in the daytime when the stars are hidden or no longer exist, the grass is green and it sways lightly then too in the morning breeze or the afternoon breeze. In the daytime the grass buzzes with the activity of insects and rodents and other larger animals some of which eat the grass for sustenance. Then I tell him that the stars had no interest in his proposal and he blinks.

One day while eating breakfast at the kitchen table directly below the hole in the wall, the man next door coughs a little. It isn’t very loud but he usually doesn’t make noise unless we are in direct eye contact. I finish eating my cereal and then I wash the dishes. In order to delay the inevitable, I even dry the dishes and place them in their proper place before confronting the man next door at the hole in the wall. I ask him if he is alright and pass a cough drop through the cough drop-sized hole in the wall. He thanks me and asks about the stars. I tell him I haven’t talked to them much lately and besides, there are more important things to spend time thinking about. “Like what?” he asks. I tell him about nuclear weapons because it’s the first thing that comes to mind. I tell him about the difference between fusion/fission nuclear weapons and the new pure fusion nuclear weapons that are currently under development in the unknown deserts and forgotten islands of the world. He says the stars might know something about that. I listen to his over-wrought explanation about the technical aspects of a star and even though his description is wordy and sometimes beyond my comprehension, I have to admit that he might be onto something.

That night, I lay in the grass on my back staring at the sky until dawn breaks. I ask the stars questions that the man next door told me to ask. I wrote down the questions on a small notepad, transcribed as best I could. The hole in the wall sometimes leaves artifacts in our speech though so I had to guess which words and sounds were extraneous. The stars knew things beyond our basic understandings of nuclear physics and certainly beyond my basic understandings of science and no matter how quickly I wrote, the words strung together on my notepad only added to nonsense. I spent the whole night like this. I spoke my disjointed findings from the stars to the man next door through the hole he drilled into our wall and even in his eyeball I could see him nodding. After I finished speaking my notes to him, he filled the hole with Spackle and left the hole in the wall.
For weeks there were loud noises that I could hear through the wall and then one day he left.